Canada's largest pension fund made a $741 million commitment today to CtrlS, one of India's biggest data center operators. The deal has two parts: a direct equity stake in the company and a joint construction venture to build new large-scale facilities. CPP Investments has been putting money into India since 2009 and now holds about $27 billion in assets there, making this a continuation of an established strategy, not a leap of faith.
CtrlS itself is not a startup. Founded in 2007 and based in Hyderabad, it already runs more than 15 data centers across India. In 2023 it announced a $2 billion plan to expand capacity, and this new capital from CPP accelerates that. The pre-money valuation implied by the stake purchase puts CtrlS at roughly $6.6 billion, which gives a sense of how large the Indian data center market has already become.
The broader picture is striking. India currently generates around 20% of the world's data but hosts only about 3% of global data center capacity. That gap is drawing in capital from everywhere. Blackstone-backed AirTrunk announced $30 billion in planned India investments just two weeks ago. Google broke ground on a $15 billion AI facility in Andhra Pradesh in April. Microsoft committed $3 billion earlier this year. Adani Group has pledged $100 billion for renewable-powered data centers by 2035. India's total installed capacity stood at roughly 1.5 gigawatts at the end of 2025, and projections put it at somewhere between 5 and 8 gigawatts by 2030.
The Indian government has been actively encouraging this. Data centers were classified as essential infrastructure in 2020, which opened the door to lower electricity rates and easier financing. A more recent policy offers tax exemptions to foreign cloud providers on services sold abroad, provided those services run from data centers on Indian soil, through 2047. India's data protection law, passed in 2023, also pushes multinationals to store Indian user data locally, which adds another layer of structural demand.
For business operators globally, the implication is not abstract. The price and availability of AI-powered services, cloud computing, and data storage will increasingly be shaped by where this infrastructure gets built. India is positioning itself as a lower-cost alternative to the US, UK, and Japan for running digital workloads. That matters if your company uses cloud software, runs customer data through AI tools, or sources technology services from India-based providers.
There is a real constraint, though. India has 18% of the world's population and only 4% of its freshwater. Data centers need enormous amounts of water for cooling. In 2025, Indian data centers consumed an estimated 150 billion liters of water. That figure is projected to more than double by 2030. Electricity demand from data centers is also expected to grow nearly fivefold in the same period. India has chronic infrastructure bottlenecks, and building at this pace will test both the power grid and water supply in ways that could slow the whole program down.
This is also worth noting: all of this capital is going into the pipes and buildings that run AI, not into developing AI itself. India has a small number of companies building their own AI models, but the actual AI technology being used across the country continues to come almost entirely from US firms. India is becoming a major host for AI infrastructure without yet becoming a major maker of AI. Whether that changes as the infrastructure matures is an open question.